#klingon resources

[daily-klingon]

Resources

Watch this blog on Sunday. I'm going to post a list of the basic resources you'll need to get a firm foundation of Klingon.

#klingon language #the klingon dictionary #klingon resources #loghvam yIbej - watch this space

[salvadorbonaparte]

Duolingo Alternatives by Language

Disclaimer: I haven't used or tested all of them. All resources have different strengths, e.g. Drops being designed for vocabulary. They often aren't full alternatives for Duolingo or formal classes. I just wanted to compile resources for all languages on Duolingo to make the switch easier, especially for the less popular languages.

Feel free to also check out my collection of free textbooks

If you want a more detailed resource list for any of these languages (or perhaps one not listed here) you can send me an ask and I can see what I can do.

Arabic

AlifBee

Arabic Unlocked

Beelinguapp

Bluebird

Busuu

Clozemaster

Drops

Infinite Arabic

Ling

LinGo Play

LingQ

Mango

Mondly

Qlango

Write It! Arabic

Catalan

Bluebird

Clozemaster

Drops

Ling

LinGo Play

LingQ

LyricsTraining

Mondly

Qlango

Chinese

Bluebird

Beelinguapp

Bunpo

Busuu

Chineasy

Clozemaster

Drops

Du Chinese

Hello Chinese

HeyChina

Immersive Chinese

Infinite Chinese

Ling

Lingodeer

LinGo Play

Lingopie

LingQ

Mango

Mondly

Pleco Chinese Dictionary

Qlango

Czech

Bluebird

Clozemaster

Ling

LinGo Play

Mango

Mondly

Qlango

Danish

Babbel

Bluebird

Clozemaster

Drops

Ling

LinGo Play

Lingvist

LingQ

Mango

Mondly

Qlango

Dutch

Babbel

Bluebird

Busuu

Clozemaster

Drops

Ling

LinGo Play

Lingvist

LingQ

LyricsTraining

Mango

Mondly

Say Something in Dutch

Qlango

Esperanto

Clozemaster

Drops

Esperanto12.net

Kurso de Esperanto

LingQ

Qlango

Finnish

Bluebird

Clozemaster

Drops

Ling

LinGo Play

LingQ

LyricsTraining

Mango

Mondly

Qlango

French

Babbel

Bluebird

Beelinguapp

Bunpo

Busuu

Clozemaster

Collins French Dictionary

Conjuu

Dr French

Drops

HeyFrance

Infinite French

Lilata

Ling

Linga

Lingodeer

LinGo Play

Lingopie

Lingvist

LingQ

Listen Up

LyricsTraining

Mango

Mondly

Nextlingua

Oxford French Dictionary

Qlango

TV5MONDE

Xeropan

German

Babbel

Bluebird

Beelinguapp

Bunpo

Busuu

Clozemaster

Collins German Dictionary

Conjuu

Drops

DW Learn German

Infinite German

Ling

Linga

Lingodeer

Lingopie

LinGo Play

Lingvist

LingQ

LyricsTraining

Mango

Mondly

Nextlingua

Oxford German Dictionary

Qlango

Xeropan

Greek

Bluebird

Clozemaster

Drops

Greek Alphabet Academy

Ling

LinGo Play

LingQ

Mango

Mondly

Qlango

Write It! Greek

Guaraní

Clozemaster

Guarani Ayvu

Haitian Creole

Bluebird

Mango

Hawaiian

Drops

Mango

ʻŌlelo Online

Hebrew

Bluebird

Clozemaster

Drops

Ling

LinGo Play

LingQ

Mango

Mondly

Shepha

Write It! Hebrew

High Valyrian

Valyrian Dictionary

Hindi

Bhasha

Bluebird

Beelinguapp

Clozemaster

Drops

Hindwi Dictionary

Ling

LinGo Play

LingQ

Mango

Mondly

Qlango

Hungarian

Bluebird

Clozemaster

Drops

Ling

LinGo Play

LingQ

Mango

Mondly

Qlango

Indonesian

Babbel

Bluebird

Clozemaster

Drops

Ling

LinGo Play

LingQ

Mango

Mondly

Irish

Bluebird

Clozemaster

Collins Irish Dictionary

Drops

Easy Irish

Ling

Mango

Teanglann

Italian

Babbel

Beelinguapp

Bluebird

Bunpo

Busuu

Clozemaster

Collins Italian Dictionary

Conjuu

Drops

Infinite Italian

Ling

Linga

Lingodeer

Lingopie

LinGo Play

Lingvist

LingQ

LyricsTraining

Mango

Mondly

Nextlingua

Oxford Italian Dictionary

Qlango

Japanese

Beelinguapp

Bluebird

Bunpo

Busuu

Clozemaster

Drops

HeyJapan

Hiragana Quest

Infinite Japanese

kawaiiDungeon

Ling

Lingodeer

Lingopie

Lingvist

LingQ

LyricsTraining

Mango

Mondly

Oyomi Japanese Reader

renshuu

Takoboto Japanese Dictionary

Todaii

Qlango

Write It! Japanese

Klingon

boQwl! Klingon Language

Klingon Translator

Write It! Klingon

Korean

Beelinguapp

Bluebird

Bunpo

Busuu

Clozemaster

Drops

Hangul Quest

HeyKorea

Infinite Korean

Ling

LinGo Play

Lingopie

Lingodeer

Lingvist

LingQ

Mango

Mondly

Qlango

Write It! Korean

Latin

Bluebird

Cattus

Clozemaster

Collins Latin Dictionary

Grammaticus Maximus

Latinia

Legentibus

LingQ

Mango

Mondly

Perdisco

Qlango

Vice Verba

Navajo

Navajo Language Renaissance

Navajo Language Program

Speak Navajo

Norwegian

Babbel

Bluebird

Clozemaster

Drops

Ling

LinGo Play

Lingvist

LingQ

Mango

Mondly

Mjolnir Norwegian

Norskappen

Qlango

Polish

Babbel

Bluebird

Busuu

Clozemaster

Drops

Ling

LinGo Play

Lingvist

LingQ

LyricsTraining

Mango

Mondly

Qlango

Portuguese

Babbel

Beelinguapp

Bluebird

Bunpo

Busuu

Clozemaster

Collins Portuguese Dictionary

Drops

Infinite Portuguese

Ling

Lingodeer

Lingopie

LinGo Play

Lingvist

LingQ

LyricsTraining

Mango

Mondly

Nextlingua

Qlango

Romanian

Bluebird

Clozemaster

Drops

Ling

LinGo Play

LingQ

Mango

Mondly

Qlango

Russian

Babbel

Bluebird

Beelinguapp

Busuu

Clozemaster

Collins Russian Dictionary

Drops

Infinite Russian

Ling

Linga

LinGo Play

Lingopie

Lingodeer

Lingvist

LingQ

Mango

Mondly

Nextlingua

Qlango

Write It! Russian

Scottish Gaelic

Bluebird

Clozemaster

Go!Gaelic

Mango

Spanish

Babbel

Beelinguapp

Bluebird

Bunpo

Busuu

Clozemaster

Collins Spanish Dictionary

ConjuGato

Conjuu

Drops

Infinite Spanish

Ling

Linga

Lingodeer

LinGo Play

Lingvist

LingQ

Listen Up

LyricsTraining

Mango

Mondly

Nextlingua

Say Something in Spanish

SpanishDict

Qlango

Xeropan

Swahili

Bluebird

Bui Bui Swahili App

Clozemaster

Drops

Ling

LinGo Play

LingQ

Mango

Nkenne

Swedish

Babbel

Beelinguapp

Bluebird

Clozemaster

Drops

Ling

LinGo Play

Lingvist

LingQ

LyricsTraining

Mango

Mondly

Qlango

Turkish

Babbel

Beelinguapp

Bluebird

Busuu

Clozemaster

Drops

Ling

LinGo Play

LingQ

LyricsTraining

Mango

Mondly

Qlango

Ukrainian

Bluebird

Clozemaster

Drops

Ling

LinGo Play

LingQ

Mango

Mondly

Mova Ukrainian

Qlango

Speak Ukrainian

Vietnamese

Bluebird

Clozemaster

Collins Vietnamese Dictionary

Drops

Learn Vietnamese with Annie

Ling

Lingodeer

LinGo Play

Mango

Mondly

Welsh

BBc Cymru Fyw

Bluebird

Clozemaster

Say Something in Welsh

Yiddish

Bluebird

Clozemaster

Mango

Proste Yiddish

Roni Gal Learn Yiddish

Vaybertaytsh

Yiddish Book Center

Zulu

Bluebird

Nkenne

Bonus: Polygloss which claims to be available for all languages as long as there is another user also learning the same language

#langblr #language learning #duolingo #studyblr #studyspo

[spiderben2011]

Closed RP w/mazamba

This planet Jason was on was once thriving world. A planet full of trees, water, animals, and people. All who lived peacefully on the planet, until a war broke out in this sector. This left the planet in ruins, all of its resources plundered, and its people nearly wiped out. Centuries have passed and the planet has been nearly forgotten.

Jason was told the planet was under the control of a group called the Klingons. He didn’t think too much about it and knew he would be out of here before they found out or one of their allies.

He walks over towards his prize. A box containing a valuable item that he knew would come in for a pretty penny...or whatever currency the people of this universe use. He walks over and begins to disable any security systems around, before getting his prize. He wipes away the dirt from it, opens it, and smiles when he saw what’s inside.

“Just like the buyer said,” Jason whispered before putting the box in his bag. 

@mazamba

#mazamba #closed rp #closed #close #close rp #jason yondu quill oc #star-lord oc

[isagrimorie]

People give Janeway guff about not giving Kazon replicators and transporters. Still, it's proven repeatedly that giving one Kazon faction an advantage over the other would be mixing it up in an internal war that would LITERALLY shift the balance of power.

Klingons at least know the technology they have engineers, even as it's becoming a dying breed over Warriors.

TLDR in Alliance Chakotay and Tuvok convinces Janeway that making an alliance with a Kazon faction is the way to go.

And so she does finally concede on this little experiment but with a lot of reservations going in: That once they leave the infighting will go on, and might actually have been worse.

Tuvok naively thinks it might help and bring about a Federation.

B'Elanna then pushes forward Harry's sarcastic comment about forming an alliance with Seska and then at the first sign of this, Chakotay balks.

And then Janeway says something that I feel is her guiding principle in dealing with hard decisions:

Janeway: "You can't have it both ways Commander. If you want to get in the mud with the Kazon you can't start complaining that you might get dirty."

Again, this is what I love about Janeway -- she gets flack for it but when Janeway makes a decision no one else wants to make it.

As I've mentioned in another post in tags: #right or wrong#i admire how janeway is always the one#who goes#the buck stops with me#she makes the hard choices on voyager#especially during debates#when the staff just goes around and around in circles#like in memorial where she starts just in the background#listening to the senior staff debate#from how janeway started in episode 2 of season 1#where she's presented with the horrific#sophie's choice of neelix dying because he has no lungs#and then subjecting another person to the same fate#to the (now boring debate about tuvix)#to this moment#to the moment on the memorial episode#she will take on that burden#and she will always stare at the hardest choice unflinchingly#because someone has to#as the 12th doctor once said#sometimes all your choices are bad ones#but you still have to choose#

In this episode, she allowed herself to be persuaded but she's not sold on it. But she's letting her crew run with it -- okay so we do this, but if we do this, we commit to it. And yet, at the first uncomfortable decisions... there's already balking. This was Janeway testing the waters if any other person on her senior staff could carry water about making the hard choices.

So far the ones who have stepped up were B'Elanna, Tom, and Neelix.

Anyway, I wish there was more fallout on the whole Kazon vs Trabe conflict because that was actually interesting.

But also Voyager had a Doctor Who problem -- if they meddle in the affairs of a spatial politik, they don't know the repercussions of their actions and just look at Living Witness and the reputation Voyager gained simply by doing a bit of a trade deal.

Voyager can help when they can, see: helping Brenari refugees escape the Devore. (Counterpoint).

But they can't and shouldn't really interfere with internal politics. They're not like DS9 where they can stay in one place and fix things permanently. They're just passing through.

This is also why I think she wasn't really considering Tuvok and Chakotay's thing during the Void episode where they raid another ship's resources. (Also, because after Ransom and Equinox, she knows what faltering in the Federation principles can do).

Crucially, she's also known both Chakotay and Tuvok enough that while she loves them -- Janeway knows neither men have the stomach for their proposals.

The Alliance episode was one example of that already.

Janeway, though, if she is pushed to make that commitment and there was absolutely NO way they can prevent raiding others-- Janeway would have committed to that action 110%. This is why I feel Janeway would actually come to a similar conclusion as Sisko in In the Pale Moonlight.

Especially, if she gets daily reports of Starfleet casualties. I have a feeling, there would be less kicking and screaming when Garak finally does his reveal.

Janeway has rules for a reason. She is fastidious about it. For a reason. Because once she commits to an action, it will take both hell and high water to take her off that course.

/edited

#star trek voyager #kathryn janeway #voyager s2 #(what is it about briefing room scenes in early seasons #why is it so inert? the only thing keeping the scene #interesting was kate mulgrew's force of personality)

[cantsayidont]

While this ranks relatively low on my overall list of complaints about STAR TREK: DISCOVERY and STRANGE NEW WORLDS, something I find annoying about them is that they've really built up the size and strength of Starfleet to something closer to what it is in STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, which contradicts TOS in ways that have far-reaching story effects.

TOS repeatedly indicates that in that period Starfleet has only a handful of ships in the Enterprise's class, presumably because they're resource-intensive to build and operate. As Kirk and John Christopher discuss in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday":

CHRISTOPHER: Must have taken quite a lot to build a ship like this. KIRK: There are only twelve like it in the fleet.

That plainly doesn't mean that Starfleet has no other ships, but ships of what TOS describes as the "Starship" class ("Constitution-class" is a later coinage) are uniquely capable. As Merik, former commander of the SS Beagle, explains in "Bread and Circuses":

MERIK: He commands not just a spaceship, Proconsul, but a starship. A very special vessel and crew. I tried for such a command.

This special status is a central part of the premise of TOS: It's the reason why the Enterprise is assigned such a diverse array of duties, and why what the Enterprise does is so important to the plot. Even into the TOS cast movie era, we're frequently told that the Enterprise is the only ship in the sector capable of responding to a problem or threat, and the crew is rarely in a position to call for reinforcements even where that would be tactically or strategically advisable.

While that makes duty on one of these ships very risky (as evidenced by the number of the Enterprise's sister ships that are lost with all hands in TOS, including Constellation, Defiant, and Exeter), as Merik's remark indicates, it's also a plum assignment, and one for which there's obviously fierce competition. The TOS bible makes much of the fact that Kirk is the youngest person ever to command one of these starships, and he also appears to be one of the lowest-ranking. (Many of the other starship captains we see are fleet captains or commodores, as well as being older than Kirk.) This comes into play at a variety of points: For instance, it's at the root of Ben Finney's animosity toward Kirk in "Court Martial" (and presumably why Kirk's peers are quick to give him the cold shoulder when he's charged with negligence in Finney's apparent death), and it's part of the tension in "The Doomsday Machine," where Kirk and Spock have to maneuver around the fact that Matt Decker outranks Kirk and is clearly the senior officer.

The limited number of starships also provides a useful Watsonian explanation for the dichotomy of a capital warship (which the Enterprise unequivocally is) being used for scientific research and exploration missions. Although TOS is reluctant to say much about civilian life within the Federation, we can probably assume that such costly starships are the subject of a lot of political wrangling, and the different roles the Enterprise plays probably reflect those tensions: The Enterprise's scientific duties may be a concession to those who (like David Marcus in STAR TREK II) are wary of Starfleet's military role, and perhaps an effort to extract a greater civilian return on the Federation's obviously substantial military investment. It might also be a diplomatic ploy, or an attempt to maneuver around arms control treaties with rival powers like the Klingons and Romulans. (Arms-limitation treaties are probably the most plausible explanation for the Enterprise-A being so hastily decommissioned and its entire class apparently being mothballed shortly after STAR TREK VI.)

DISCOVERY and STRANGE NEW WORLDS pay lip service to the specialness of ships of the Enterprise's class while undermining the point by indicating that Starfleet also has hundreds if not thousands of other, slightly smaller starships with 80 or 90 percent of the Enterprise's capabilities, carrying out a similar range of missions. I can see why they've gone that way, and there's obvious precedent for it in the TOS cast movies, which depict several other classes of Starfleet ships, but interposing that into the TOS era inevitably weakens the premise of the original stories, and renders many of the conceits of TOS unintelligible. (If it were up to me, I would attribute the expanded range of ships to changes between TOS and the era of the movies, which are set years later and have different narrative priorities.)

This retroactive Starfleet expansion also exacerbates the increasingly jingoistic militarism of modern STAR TREK, which is uncomfortably pronounced in both the Abrams films (which got money from the Pentagon for it) and in the recent shows (which I suspect are also getting DOD money, although I haven't seen that specifically confirmed). The large-scale fleet maneuvers of the finale of PICARD, for instance, are frankly terrifying, and would be even without the contrivances of the plot. A Federation that celebrates "Frontier Day" with a massive display of military power within the solar system, obviously aimed at awing and intimidating citizen and adversary alike, seems like a pretty harrowing "post-scarcity socialist utopia," even by the standards of a show that's always been about the crews of a spacegoing navy doing interstellar colonialism.

#teevee #star trek #star trek tos #star trek discovery #strange new worlds

[dduane]

Have you ever thought of writing a "Learning Rihannsu/Romulan" book with a dictionary?

...Well, not since the early 1980s. Because that's how the Rihannsu books got started in the first place.

The (published) Klingon linguistics works were then in their earliest stages, and I found myself wondering why the Romulans shouldn't have something similar. So I asked my editors at Pocket Books about it (this being just a little while after The Wounded Sky came out). They told me that there wasn't much interest at the Paramount end in doing something like that; not least because (at that point) the Klingon Dictionary, they said, wasn't selling all that well.

"But," my editor said to me, "if you wanted to do a book about Romulans, or something about Romulan culture—because we know almost nothing about that—they say that sounds like something they wouldn't mind seeing from you."

"Oh really," I said.

So I went off and thought about it for a week or three: then wrote the outline for My Enemy, My Ally, and asked my agent to send it to the editors.

"Sold," said the editors and Paramount about two weeks later, pretty much in the same breath. And that's where the five Rihannsu books got started.

So at this point, the idea of doing a Rihannsu language resource sounds, well, a little circular to me. Therefore I'll happily leave that to somebody else... and if they want me to consult on it, they know where to find me.

Thanks for inquiring, though. :)

#Rihannsu

[olderthannetfic]

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/730187969463549952/httpswwwtumblrcomolderthannetfic730161592705

I think the biggest problem with Duolingo is a combo of that a lot of the newer languages (which are disproportionately non-Western or indigenous languages) don’t have a lot of the extra features that REALLY help you learn stuff (like explaining grammar rules in more detail, which maybe it’s just me but I do actually need to know the logic behind a rule to learn it, not just have it thrown at me in a lesson) — like you see that with Spanish and French and like that’s great, but I learned those in school and just use them to refresh my memory, I don’t really need that for those, but I’d LOVE an actual EXPLANATION of how articles work in Haitian Creole *in app* rather than having to Google it but of course that one is completely barebones — and that they streamline every feature that is there to make it the same across languages. Like I was noticing that they cared a lot about the order in which I wrote a character when I was learning the Cyrillic alphabet and as someone who took some basic Russian in college a few years ago I was like lol WTF is this, and a friend who’s learning Japanese said stroke order is actually important for characters in that language and Chinese. Great! But why tf is it showing up with EVERY alphabet teaching feature, in languages where that doesn’t matter (and other stuff DOES matter more that isn’t included). Like maybe if they weren’t so focused on everything being the same they could teach letters in an actually intuitive order for each language.

Anyway what I find infuriates me about the lack of resources for the less “popular” languages is that those learners need Duolingo more. There are a gazillion apps for learning Spanish or French or Russian or Japanese. But how many other apps are out there for people learning Haitian Creole or Navajo (or for that matter, the conlangs like Klingon)? Those learners need the app more but they aren’t giving them any useful resources.

--

Yeah, for real. Sometimes, it's your only option, and it's always worse for newly-added and less popular languages, like many apps are.

[communistkenobi]

i don’t know if you have seen the TOS movies so i will try to be as vague about this as possible so to not spoil them for you. i think a large portion (or at least a portion) of the issues presented in TOS are because starfleet sucks, to put it in the best words. this is not including the issues and harm it has done on real people, im talking about the in-universe starfleet and how it presents itself and its rules (example: colonization (encouraging its captains to colonize, encouraging its captains to make other planets and civilizations join their “american” federation)). a larger and more prominent explanation is how its, as described in VI, a “homosapiens-only club”. the klingon who says this also goes on to say that the federation is racist. and this is shown after both kirk and spock say they believe that the federation is peaceful. and obviously they think that because that’s what it presents itself as to it’s employees. another example is in TSFS when a higher authority from the federation tells kirk that he doesn’t believe in vulcan rituals, therefore, if kirk does this ritual, he will be fired. i know this is shown in the show as well but the more obvious examples are from the movies; to me it feels like they’re outright saying it in the films

i know this is not how it was intended to be perceived but this is what the show presents it as. i could be missing something or misunderstanding but this is how i see it, and from what i’ve heard, this is talked about in ds9

also starfleet coincidentally decides that the dark skinned aliens are enemies (this is more of a writing choice and the writers (and character designers) are at fault for this but it presents itself as an obvious issue, in universe, in V & VI)

I’ve seen the first four movies! My recall on canon and the intricacies of starfleet etc are not so precise, so I appreciate the context and some of that sounds familiar. I’m assuming you’re responding to my bitching about the politics of tos and how disconnected it is (in my view) with the fandom’s perception of tos as a progressive cultural text. 

I think those examples are good highlights of a lot of the in-universe problems with Starfleet. To go a step further, I think even absent Starfleet’s racist or discriminatory history in-universe, the show itself (at least tos, I haven’t seen the others) operates on a colonial imaginary, by which I mean, its basic narrative premises and assumptions are colonial (and therefore racist) in character.

Like okay, the premise of tos is that the Enterprise, as an ambassador of Starfleet/the Federation, is seeking out new alien life to study. The Prime Directive prohibits the Enterprise crew from interfering with the development of any alien culture or people while they do this, so the research they collect needs to be done in an unobtrusive way. I think this is the first point at which people balk at the charge that tos is colonial - the Enterprise’s mission is premised on non-interference, and I think when people hear ‘colonial’ as a descriptor they (understandably, obviously) assume it is describing active conquest, genocide, and dispossession. Even setting aside all the times where Kirk does directly interfere with the “development” of a people or culture (usually because they’ve “stagnated” culturally, because a culture without conflict cannot evolve or “develop” beyond its current presumed capacity - he is pretty explicitly imposing his own values onto another culture in order to force them to change in a particular way), or the times when the Enterprise is actually looking to extract resources from a given planet or people, I’m not exactly making this claim, or rather, that’s not the only thing I’m describing when calling tos colonial.

Its presentation of scientific discovery and inquiry is anthropological - the “object” of analysis is alien/foreign culture, meaning that when the Enterprise crew comes into contact with a new being or person, this person is always read first and foremost through the level of (the Enterprise’s understanding of) culture. Their behaviour, beliefs, dress, way of speaking, appearance, and so on are always reflective of (and represent a microcosm of) their culture as a whole, and more importantly, that their racial or phenotypic characteristics define the boundaries of their culture, ie, culture is interpreted, navigated, and bound racially. Because of this, Kirk and Co are never really interacting with individuals, they are interacting with components of a (foreign, exotic, fundamentally different) culture. And when they interact with these cultures, they very frequently measure them using a universalized scale of development - they have an evolutionary view of culture, ie, that all cultures go from savage to rational, primitive to advanced, economically marginal to economically dominant (ie, to capitalism). And the metrics they are judging these cultures by are fundamentally Western ones, always emphasising to the audience that the final destination of all cultures (that are worthy of advancing beyond their current limited/“primitive” stages) is a culture identical to the Federation, a culture that can itself engage in this anthropological mission to catalogue all life as fitting within a universal set of practices and racial similarities they call “culture.”

This is a western, colonial understanding of culture - racially and spatially homogenous people comprise the organs of a social totality, ie, a society, which can then be analysed as an “object,” as a “phenomenon,” by the scientists in order to extract information from them to produce and advance state (ie Federation) knowledge. The Enterprise crew are allowed to be individuals, are allowed to be subjects with a capacity for reason, contradiction, emotion, compassion, and even moments of savagery or violence, without those things being assigned to their “race” or “culture” as a whole, but the people they interact with are only components of a whole which are “discovered” by the Enterprise as opportunities to expand and refine the Federation’s body of knowledge.

And on the flip side you have the Klingons, which you brought up - a “race” that is uniformly savage, backward, violent, and dangerous. In the episode Day of the Dove, where Klingons board the Enterprise along with an alien cloud that makes everyone very aggressive and racist (this show is insane lol), the Enterprise crew begins acting violent and racist, but the Klingons don’t change. They aren’t more violent than before (because they already were fundamentally violent and racist), and they don’t become less violent when the cloud eventually leaves (because they are never able to emerge from their violence and savagery as a social condition or external imposition - they simply are that way). Klingons are racially, behaviourally, psychologically, and culturally homogenous, universally violent and immune to reason, and their racial characteristics are both physical manifestations of this universal violence as well as the origin of it. The writers and creators of tos are consciously invoking the orientalist idea of the “Mongolian horde,” representing both the American fear of Soviet global takeover as well as blatantly racist fears about “asiatics” (a word used in the show, particularly in The Omega Glory where a fear of racialised communist takeover is made explicit) dominating the world.

This is colonial thinking! Like, fundamentally, at its core, this is colonial white supremacist thinking. Now this is not the fault of tos as an individual show, this is a problem with western science in general, and I am not expecting a television show to navigate its way outside of this current colonial paradigm of scientific knowledge. I’m also not expecting an average person watching this to pick out all the intricacies of this and link it to the colonial history of Europe or the colonial history of western science. But this base premise of Star Trek is why the show is fundamentally colonial - even if the crew never intervened in any alien conflict, never extracted any material resources from other people, and even if the Federation did not have all these explicitly racist practices that you outlined, this would still be colonial logic and colonial thinking. The show has a fundamentally colonial imagination when it comes to exploration, discovery, and culture.

And so my problem, which is maybe where I need to adjust expectations for tumblr fandom, is when people call this show socialist or durably progressive in any way. This is not because socialist societies can’t be colonial or can’t be racist, obviously they can be those things, but because people are bundling “post-racist, post-bigotry, post-discrimination” in their labelling of tos as “socialist media.” When I hear someone call a piece of media socialist I am also bringing my own assumptions into those things, ie, I am expecting this claim to be actually reflective of the politics within the show to some degree. There can of course be debates about the exact nature and quality of those socialistic politics (see conversations about the politics of Disco Elysium, a contemporary canonical example of actual “socialist art”), but I’m at least expecting there to by a whiff of them in there! And I don’t think tos stands up to basic scrutiny in this regard. I genuinely do not even buy that it’s progressive, for reasons I’ve outlined above. Again that’s a genre problem, I think all sci-fi has to contend with this, but tos is certainly not a progressive exception to the political norms of sci-fi as a genre. 

And THIS IS OBVIOUSLY not me saying you can’t like tos or that you’re racist for doing so, I deeply enjoy the show on its own terms, and its politics (good and bad) are part of that enjoyment. I’m also someone who is in university & complicit in all of these colonial scientific assumptions and practices, I’m not positioning myself as morally superior in this discussion. But when people package their enjoyment of the show with their analysis of it as socialist, as progressive, I think that is pretty fucking stupid and leads to a lot of handwaving of its fundamentally racist narrative premises. Hence my bitching 

#pulling from Edward Said’s Orientalism + Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth + Aníbal Quijano’s Coloniality of Power for these points btw #sorry I know I’m citing academic texts in a tumblr post about tv show but those are largely the sources of my opinions #oh as well as Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. everyone needs to read that #tos.txt #anyway if this wasn’t what you were responding to then sorry lol

[whirligig-girl]

Commission for @foxgirlchorix of her @torchship-rpg Zinovian character Avietka gaining a flood of thirty bazillion Unity with Isabel, a butch Gymnomi woman.

Glossary: Avietka: nickname of a Zinovian who is a cosmonaut in Star Patrol with a Signals certification. (her nickname is just the russian term for a very small aircraft, an Aviet, since she used to fly them as part of rescue operations in antarctica) Isabel: a Gymnomi slimegirl who was rescued from the laboratory of an Aquillian War Rocket during the war, grew up in Camp Aldrin and later rural Appalachia, and then became a security cosmonaut for Star Patrol. Gymnomi: (non-canon) my own original species for Torchship using the game's Amorphous Form trait (basically just exporting my Eaurp Guz species headcanons and worldbuilding into this new setting.) Zinovian: green klingon catgirls/pantherwomen Unity: a resource in the game mechanics of Torchship which tracks how well a crew works together. Mechanically, it allows you to reroll a check to get another shot at succeeding (representing more than one person working together on a problem). It has a funny interaction with the Relationship mechanics in the game, in that:

Mutual Crushes are the best though, because you get a proper will-they-or-won’t-they system. Every episode that goes by where the two are crushing on one another but having acted on it, you mark a track. When they finally get over themselves and smooch, you get a massive amount of Unity for each mark on the track, which also incentivises them doing this dramatic thing at moments when you absolutely need like thirty bazillion Unity for the task ahead.

#wlw #sapphic #lesbian #femslash #Torchship #Torchship TTRPG #TTRPG #TTRPG art #art #digital art #Star Trek #not actually star trek #catgirl #slimegirl #slime girl #star patrol #girls kissing girls

[whovianwatchingstartrek]

A Whovian Watches Star Trek for the First Time: Part 106 - Deep Cover within a Deep Cover

Star Trek: Discovery - Season 1 Episode 11 - The Wolf Inside

We open this episode with a monologue from Michael about her time so far in the Empire universe, and how the constant need to watch her back is effecting her. Additionally, we find out that this universe's Saru is a slave, which is sad to see, but for this universe's standards should have been expected. Also the use of a transporter as a method of execution is absolutely brutal to see.

Michael has managed to obtain the information on the Defiant, however cracking the firewall from the Shenzhou is difficult, and sending it to Discovery would be noticed.

Unfortunately back on Discovery, our crew has discovered the death of Colbert, and their immediate assumption is that in his current state, Paul did it. Sylvia has an idea to cure Paul's condition however, and takes him down to the engineering lab. Her theory is that the Spore Network is simply using all of Paul's physical resources to keep the portal between the universes open, and that a fresh dose of spores might wake him up, and she puts this hypothesis to the test.

On the Shenzhou, Michael has been given the location of the leader of the Klingon rebellion, someone called "The Firewolf" and is ordered to kill him.

In a private conversation with Lorca, Michael reveals that she is really hopeful that this rebellion could lead to a Federation like entity if it wins. It's even made up of the same mix of species as the Federation founders, just substituting Klingons for Humans. She is reluctant to go through with her orders. Her plan is to beam into the Firewolf's camp with Ash to negotiate. The pair are captured immediately after appearing, and are taken to the firewolf.

Apparently Sarek is among the firewolf's camp, and they refer to him as "The Prophet". Sarek performs a mindmeld with Michael, and sees the memories from the Federation Universe, and he clears any doubt about Michael's intentions. Michael, looking for advice on how to help with the war in the Federation universe starts asking the Firewolf questions, however a lot of the Firewolf's answers start to trigger Ash's sleeper programming, and a sword fight ensues. Sarek manages to break it up however, and continues to vouch for Michael.

Meanwhile on Discovery, Sylvia's experiment is having a positive effect on Paul, and moving the stress on his brain to some of his other organs, however it then goes wrong, and medical staff have to step in to stabilise him, but he goes braindead, albiet only temporarily. Once Tilly is alone with him, we get to see Paul's perspective inside the spore network, and we're teased with him encountering his empire universe counterpart.

Back on Shenzhou, Ash finally confesses as much as he can about his current state to Michael, and he starts to remember his true past. Apparently, he is a Klingong that was molded into a human and given false memories to infiltrate discovery. More specifically, he is the Federation Universe's counterpart to the Firewolf. He attacks Michael to avenge T'Kuvma, but the Shenzhou crew apprehend him, and Michael orders to have him Transporter Executed. As he sufficates in Space though, Discovery transport him aboard, and turns out this was partially a ruse to get the Data on the Defiant to Discovery. We're then hit with a final blow of another ship appearing to destroy the Rebels themselves, and we're hit with another surprise that apparently the Emperor is Georgiou, something which I really wasn't expecting.

I'm liking this whole corruption arc for Michael, and I thought the Ash twist was fun. It was nice seeing more of this universe, but I wish we could have spent a bit more time fleshing out the Rebels. Good episode, but I think the previous one was a bit better. Still excited to see where this goes now that the Emperor is directly involved though.

#whovian watching star trek #star trek #star trek Discovery #Star Trek DIS #Star Trek DISCO #ST DIS #ST DISCO #DIS #st: disco #DISCO #st: discovery #Discovery #ST: DIS

[leohtttbriar]

I would have loved to see Jadzia central episodes after she got together with Worf, and ones that's didn't focus on their relationship only. There was so much more to her before and then it seemed like being very immersed in everything Klingon was one of her very few traits.

yes--I absolutely agree. probably not the first to say it. she becomes this quirky, hot sidekick/girlfriend in season 5. how they wrote worf and dax getting together was cute and "screwball comedy" but they sort of tried to keep up that energy but not as successfully (screwball banter is cute only when both parties are getting jabs in equally, and dax seems to just smile like worf is being cute when he accuses her being ridiculous all the time)(like i said, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't)(it's just when it doesn't, worf comes across as annoying and dax comes off as Not a person). she's around quite a bit, offering her quips and support and playing her role in other people's journey's...

but episodes that are about her and depend on some issue she has within herself are not present after the romance. not like "rejoined" or the episode where she's being accused of murder bc of curzon. of course, of the episodes that are about her in previous seasons, all of them except "rejoined," arguably, are about her struggling with some past self. while i think the character can go beyond that simple sci-fi-what-if design (like, for example, i think spock goes beyond the alien-conceit in most of the spock-centric episodes), i found myself missing even that watching everything after she and worf get together. if they had even drawn out that romance and showed her genuinely trying to get worf's attention for more than one or two episodes, that would've been more interesting then what ended up happening.

i also sort of get that ds9 isn't so much the "new world" part of star trek as the "new civilization"---that is, it's mostly focused on ongoing diplomacy and war plots with the same handful of richly made-up peoples. but they managed in previous seasons to still write episodes about discovery and scientific work. in season 5, scientific work all seems to be focused on julian, due to the exigency of his role, rather than dax, or both of them. like, within the typical star trek roles to play, the science officer drives the fun discovery and new-weird-stuff plots. instead of episodes about any of that in season 5, though, there's a lot of quark and odo and sisko and julian and worf all juggling their various definitions of identity. (miraculously, dax never seems to waver in that regard. with kira, it's debateable.) which. fine. it was all interesting.

i do think that the show still manages to show dax as someone particular and complex--the writing just doesn't genuinely explore any of it after writing the worf/dax relationship. the moments she does have in episodes not about her are for the most part very good and very interesting and she provides context and wisdom and motive in the way her role dictates. but the fact that i think her character is so fascinating and has so many rich options for sci-fi storytelling only makes the absence of stories focused or driven by her all the more frustrating to me. there's only so many episodes about odo's feelings i can retain interest in.

maybe give jadzia a planet to explore with a bunch of geode formations that emit a protein that causes mutations within biological creatures to cease which somehow causes changelings to crystallize while the protein is in their system and jadzia has to fight on behalf of the planet to just exist so it's not turned into a super-weapon against the dominion and this turns into a struggle with basically her and julian against everyone (they're the most idealistic) and causes real tension between kira and dax for the first time ever and sisko has to say something about how life is sacred and resources are sacred and one has to choose and then dax does something that can't be taken back and the creatures give her a small geode/collection-of-geode-creatures in thanks and she carries it around like she carries all her past-selves.

(which would then justify the way worf constantly seems to characterize her as impulsive and impractical or whatever. bc she did this one dramatic thing that no one can now forget about her. and she just takes it bc she would do it again. and the audience just doesn't know who to agree with.)(but that would make her person with deep conviction and interiority and some perhaps truly un-likeable traits. instead of the hot, smirky-quirky jester that gets men 18-24 to tune the fuck in once a week.)

#i did just watch children of time though and if there is a dax-centric episode this season that's it (loved it) #even if the resolution of the plot is determined by odo and not her (i still loved that episode) #ds9 #star trek #jadzia dax #obviously i'm just going to have to finish my stranded on a planet kiradax fic #be the change you want to see in the world etc.

[salvadorbonaparte]

Since my big Languages and Linguistics MEGA folder post is approaching 200k notes (wow) I am celebrating with some highlights from my collection:

Africa: over 90 languages so far. The Swahili and Amharic resources are pretty decent so far and I'm constantly on the lookout for more languages and more resources.

The Americas: over 100 languages of North America and over 80 languages of Central and South America and the Caribbean. Check out the different varieties for Quechua and my Navajo followers are invited to check out the selection of Navajo books, some of which are apparently rare to come by in print.

Ancient and Medieval Languages: "only" 18 languages so far but I'm pretty pleased with the selection of Latin and Old/Middle English books.

Asia: over 130 languages and I want to highlight the diversity of 16 Arabic dialects covered.

Australia: over 40 languages so far.

Constructed Languages: over a dozen languages, including Hamlet in the original Klingon.

Creoles: two dozen languages and some materials on creole linguistics.

Europe: over 60 languages. I want to highlight the generous donations I have received, including but not limited to Aragonese, Catalan, Occitan and 6 Sámi languages. I also want to highlight the Spanish literature section and a growing collection of World Englishes.

Eurasia: over 25 languages that were classified as Eurasian to avoid discussions whether they belong in Europe or Asia. If you can't find a language in either folder it might be there.

History, Culture, Science etc: Everything not language related but interesting, including a collection of "very short introductions", a growing collection of queer and gender studies books, a lot on horror and monsters, a varied history section (with a hidden compartment of the Aubreyad books ssshhhh), and small collections from everything like ethnobotany to travel guides.

Jewish Languages: 8 languages, a pretty extensive selection of Yiddish textbooks, grammars, dictionaries and literature, as well as several books on Jewish religion, culture and history.

Linguistics: 15 folders and a little bit of everything, including pop linguistics for people who want to get started. You can also find a lot of the books I used during my linguistics degree in several folders, especially the sociolinguistics one.

Literature: I have a collection of classic and modern classic literature, poetry and short stories, with a focus on the over 140 poetry collections from around the world so far.

Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia: over 40 languages and I want to highlight the collection for Māori, Cook Islands Māori and Moriori.

Programming Languages: Not often included in these lists but I got some for you (roughly 5)

Sign Languages: over 30 languages and books on sign language histories and Deaf cultures. I want to highlight especially the book on Martha's Vineyard Sign Language and the biography of Laura Redden Searing.

Translation Studies: Everything a translation student needs with a growing audiovisual translation collection

And the best news: the folders are still being updated regularly!

#Langblr #Lingblr

[lizardsfromspace]

Though Section 31 is the most well-known secret organization within the Federation, there is another, with its roots in ancient Earth...

Item #: SCP-54973

Object Class: Euclid Keter

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-54973 is currently contained within a museum ship at the Fleet Museum at █████ █████. The sensor and security logs of the Fleet Museum are scanned for signs of SCP-54973-1 every two nanoseconds by a discreet Foundation algorithm. Upon detection of a SCP-54973-1 instance, Foundation fightercraft are to be dispatched and intercept the object before it can advance to warp. Intercepted instances are to be destroyed or tractored to Foundation storage facility at the discretion of the administrator of Deep Space Site-15.

Visitors to the museum should be forbidden access to the ship's ninth deck, under a cover story of performing required renovations. Should anyone but approved researchers, ESCPH units, and D-series synths enter deck 9, they are to be detained and evaluated for memetic contamination before release. The starship's renown with the general public prevents fuller containment at this time.

Description: SCP-54973 is the primary shuttlebay of the decommissioned ████████-class starship USS ███████, NCC-█████. Anomalous properties were discovered upon the ship's return from a seven year journey in the [redacted], and the current procedures implemented.

At regular intervals, SCP-54973 produces shuttlecraft. The process by which new shuttlecraft are created is as of yet unknown, as SCP-54973 produces false records in all sensor and recording equipment placed within itself during a production event. Shuttlecraft are designated SCP-54973-1. Since the starship ███████'s return from the [redacted] and the departure of its crew, SCP-54973-1 instances have begun autonomously launching themselves into space by a unknown process and attempting a rapid acceleration to warp.

SCP-54973-1 instances resemble baseline Starfleet shuttlecraft externally, but their interiors have been made from a variety of non-standard substances, including wood, bio-neural gel, humanoid biological components, and [DATA EXPUNGED].

While in service in the [redacted], SCP-54973 exerted a strong memetic effect on its crew. Logs indicate frequent statements that ███████ had "a full complement of shuttles" no matter their losses (in reality, the starship's ordinary complement of shuttles was exhausted a little over a year into their mission). Crew additionally expressed no alarm at the anomalous nature of the shuttlecraft, or at the appearance of non-standard designs such as the "█████ █████", believing they had been constructed by the crew, despite the implausibility of constructing experimental shuttle designs with a paucity of resources.

Addendum 54973-A: On Stardate █████.█, a SCP-54973-1 instance was not intercepted in time and accelerated to Warp ██. Its current whereabouts are unknown. All ships and starbases within the territory of the Federation, Klingon Empire, Romulan Free State and other post-nova remnant governments, Nyberrite Alliance, Dominion, and I██████ Empire received a transmission in an artificial voice resembling that of ███████'s former Captain, ███████ ███████:

"I'm coming, babies. I'm coming, I'm almost back babies, I'm -"

Transmission intercepted by Foundation assets in each government before wider exposure. Meaning of transmission remains unknown.

In light of SCP-54973-1's warp ██ capabilities, upgrade to Keter suggested and approved.

#star trek voyager #scp foundation #i don't even know #long post #threshold

[conlangery]

Hi! I'm a very beginner conlang enjoyer, I've listened to some conlangery, read The Art of Language Invention, and watched some linguistics/conlang resources (Biblaridion) on YouTube. Can you recommend any resources about typology specifically for conlangers? Unfortunately, because I'm not a linguist, I may never be a real linguist, I just need to know enough for a conlanger (If it makes a difference, alien conlangs are my favorites)

I don't think there's so much typology resources specifically aimed at conlangers. You're going to have to engage with real linguistics textbooks and maybe even research in this hobby, but don't be scared. Beginning conlanger guides like the Language Construction Kit can help you get familiar with some terminology, and there are free intro linguistics textbooks out there, so you don't need to take a class if that's not available to you. I hope that Jessie Peterson's textbook will help some people with a proper introductory text.

If you're into really alien languages, I would suggest Logan Kearsley's blog. He's really interested in the subject beyond typologically unusual languages like Klingon and into languages that human beings simply cannot produce or that describe experiences humans cannot have. It's a very different focus than most conlangers have.

But my general suggestion as far as getting into conlanging and the research process is:

Get an intro text (or an intro Linguistics course if you can) to get the basics down.

Start reading some typology.

Start looking at grammars of languages -- as wide a variety as you can find.

Hope that helps.

#conlang #language #linguistics #beginner tips

[cantsayidont]

A common apologia for STAR TREK — particularly TOS, but extending to the newest shows as well — is that it wants or tries to be progressive, but is tripped up by the writers' unconscious biases or the ostensibly more backward social attitudes of its time (whatever time that may be). This argument is somewhat perplexing because STAR TREK has never been what you'd call subtle in expressing its liberal imperialist values, either in 1966–1968 or now.

The core of STAR TREK, which is explained clearly in Roddenberry's pitch and the TOS writer's bible (excerpted at some length in Stephen Whitfield's THE MAKING OF STAR TREK, inter alia), is a hybridization of Horatio Hornblower, the C.S. Forester adventure novels about a heroic British naval officer during the Napoleonic wars, and the American Western, a genre that still dominated a big swath of American TV drama in the period when STAR TREK was conceived. Roddenberry himself had previously written for some of those shows, in particular HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL, and his pitch line for STAR TREK was "WAGON TRAIN to the stars."

To its credit, STAR TREK ended up being about more than just that, but Roddenberry was very clear that at heart, the series was about extending the conquest of the American frontier to the stars. Of the Enterprise and the other ships of its class, Roddenberry said:

In addition to the twelve Starships, there are lesser classes of vessels, capable of operating over much more limited distances. They are involved in commercial ventures, survey work, archaeological expeditions, medical research, and so on. The Starships are the heavy cruisers, the ones which can best defend themselves as they probe farther and farther out, opening new areas … and then the others follow. [Whitfield, 204; emphasis added]

Because TOS avoids saying anything very substantive about civilian life and government outside of Starfleet, we actually know very little about factors may be driving this wave of colonialism. If Earth in the TOS-era is a post-scarcity paradise (which, it should be noted, the original show does not ever actually say), why leave home for a riskier, hardscrabble life on worlds like Rigel XII ("Mudd's Women") or Cestus III ("Arena")? Part of it is plainly capitalist interests: There are explicitly opportunities to strike it rich discovering or exploiting valuable resources (or fleecing those who have or hope to, as Harry Mudd does). The Federation is also keen to cement its political hold on worlds that are near the borders of rival empires; the plot of "The Trouble with Tribbles," for example, hinges on the Federation's determination to colonize Sherman's Planet, which is also claimed by the Klingon Empire.

However, these plot details are to some extent beside the point: The premise of STAR TREK, and of most Westerns, is that the importance and heroic necessity of colonizing and "developing" the frontier, bringing (white) civilization to the "savage" wilderness, is self-evident.

Much of STAR TREK is predicated on concepts of "social evolution," the idea that there are a series of consistently defined hierarchical stages from the primitive to the advanced. TOS often states this quite explicitly, but it has remained a key feature of the STAR TREK premise up to the present. This process of advancement is described as both natural and a matter of moral urgency: Kirk rails against the "stagnation" of less-advanced societies, and on multiple occasions argues that the importance of reversing stagnation (or devolution) justifies violating the Prime Directive with dramatic interventionist action to put a civilization back on what he considers the proper track.

The concepts of social evolution STAR TREK espouses are fundamentally racist — it's a philosophy that rationalizes colonial exploitation (and in the real world even slavery) — and play into the franchise's virulent anti-indigenous attitudes. Indeed, STAR TREK frequently takes an openly contemptuous view of "primitive" peoples, who in TOS are often presented as simpletons, either kindly child-men (e.g., "The Apple") or dangerous savages driven by quasi-animal cunning (as with some of the characters in "A Private Little War"). Probably the ugliest example in TOS is "The Paradise Syndrome, where Kirk loses his memory and falls in with a society of American Indians transported centuries earlier to a distant planet; the story emphasizes that, even deprived of the knowledge and technology of his century, Kirk is still the intellectual superior of the people around him (who of course are played by white actors in redface). However, this a recurring theme throughout STAR TREK: Indigenous species are consistently presented as something less than people unless their stage of advancement approximates that of 20th century Earth (as with the Roman proconsul in "Bread and Circuses," who is one of the very few indigenous "primitives" to be credited with any kind of intellectual sophistication). The application of the Prime Directive (which is wildly inconsistent and honored more in the breach than in the observance) is based not on respect for cultural differences, but on a patronizing desire to "protect" indigenous pre-warp civilizations from ideas that their primitive minds can't yet handle.

STAR TREK pays lip service to the idea of cultural and racial diversity, and the Vulcan slogan (in the third season of TOS) "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations." However, what it most consistently espouses is the importance of ensuring the march of social evolution along orthodox lines and the eventual absorption of other races, cultures, and species into the Federation's (white American liberal) ideas of socioeconomic and technological progress. As Kirk says to Ayelborne in "Errand of Mercy":

KIRK: Gentlemen, I must get you to reconsider. We can be of immense help to you. In addition to military aid, we can send you specialists, technicians. We can show you how to feed a thousand people where one was fed before. We can help you build schools, educate the young in the latest technological and scientific skills. Your public facilities are almost nonexistent. We can help you remake your world, end disease, hunger, hardship. All we ask in return is that you let us help you. Now.

"Errand of Mercy" is notable in that Kirk's condescension toward the Organians proves to be ill-founded: What he and Spock assumed was a stagnant, primitive society is actually a kind of backyard bird feeder maintained by a vastly more advanced species that is trying very hard to be patient as Kirk and the Klingons strut around making pronouncements. At the end of the episode, Kirk admits openly that he's embarrassed at how badly he misread the situation. However, this doesn't ultimately lead him to question his presumptions about social progress; he simply admits that in this specific case, they were misapplied.

The result of "Errand of Mercy," as revealed in the second season of TOS, is a peace treaty between the Federation and Klingons that makes the show's endorsement of colonialism and economic imperialism that much clearer: As we're told in "The Trouble with Tribbles," under this new treaty, if there is a territorial dispute over a newly discovered or colonized world, "one side or the other must prove it can develop the planet most efficiently," with the ostensibly benevolent and freedom-loving Federation and the ostensibly "brutal and aggressive" Klingon Empire vying to determine who will be permitted to exploit that world and its resources. The exact role of the Organians in the framing of this treaty is unclear — they have no need of or interest in Federation-style economic development, and nothing in "Errand of Mercy" suggests that they see much value in it, although the Organians do say they find the prospect of a shooting war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire both morally objectionable and "intensely painful" — but its result is to more firmly establish the Cold War conflict between the Federation and Klingons as the competition of two rival colonial powers for control of valuable territory and resources. Their conflict is a primarily economic one, not really substantively based on what Kor calls the "minor ideological differences" between the two empires, which both Kor and the Organians regard as incidental. (Kirk takes issue with that contention, but as previously noted, Kirk has more than once used the explicit threat of planetary genocide to get what he wants, so Kor probably has a point here!)

Later STAR TREK shows are sometimes more self-conscious about these values, but they seldom actually question them, and there's really only so far that STAR TREK can move these load-bearing narrative elements without becoming something really fundamentally different than it is. Moreover, DISCOVERY, STRANGE NEW WORLDS, and PICARD have seemed committed to doubling down on many of the franchise's more disturbing ideological elements, while attempting to paper over viewer unease with appeals to nostalgia, faux-patriotism, and sentimentality.

#teevee #star trek #star trek tos #the making of star trek #gene roddenberry #stephen whitfield #errand of mercy #organians #the paradise syndrome #anti-indigenous racism

[merl-merl]

I have finished watching the two seasons of Star Trek Strange New Worlds. At first I wasn’t sure what to think, but the characters really grew on me. It’s a new and different-while-also-still-being-true Star Trek show.

What I enjoy too about SNW is that all the characters care for each other, the whole show is a warm vibe with strong morals and a spirit for exploration even if sometimes, at least at first, the characters seemed generic. This is the crew that has the most women in it!

The only thing I’m bitter about even though i searched to see why was Hemmer’s death. He was the only alien-alien-looking character and i think it would feel more Star Trek if there was at least one more good ally diverse character. (Spock is very cool as always but he’s basically an elf with slight face ridges so it’s not cutting it). Plus Hemmer was just good vibes TT^TT

I think Spock is done very well, he’s still Spock but he also has a warmer vibe compared to Nimoy’s portrayal.

At first Pike and Una didn’t give me immediate ‘I like this character vibes’, like they were good but there was something missing. And then suddenly they just grew on me so fast in the middle of the first season; especially Una. I love that Pike listens to his free immediately and trusts them. There’s such a high regard for everyone on the crew.

I felt like Doctor M’Benga had few yet the some of the strongest plot lines and big moral decisions to make, as with his daughter and the Klingon representative. That episode and his performance gave me chills. I hope he has more episodes centered on him in future.

Ortegas is so fun, she’s cool and spirited and they really make a point so show how serious and amazing she is at the helm.

I was very taken with La’an, her strength and bitterness really got to me, and her intensity shows depth. She also reminds me of other characters I’ve liked so that’s also probably why.

I loved how Uhura became more into herself, and I love that she gets more characterization. She saves the day a lot, and her grappling with grief felt real to me.

Nurse Chapel’s resourcefulness and free spirit is refreshing, especially compared to how she was/became in TOS.

I hope I’m not missing anyone ;7; also putting the musical and lower decks crossover in the second hit hard (in a good away. I was also surprised how many times Kirk showed up.

Anyways, my first thoughts. ^.^

#star trek strange new worlds #Star Trek